Sunday, April 27, 2014

Surrey
NDP MLA’s Harry Bains, Sue Hammell and Bruce Ralston invited the public to a
town hall discussion of the Regulation of Recovery Houses in Surrey. The event
was held in the Newton Cultural Centre last Thursday evening, April 24th.

A small group of familiar faces from recovery
work in the Lower Mainland met first for dinner and a bit of a strategy meeting
and then headed over to the event together. The contingent included John
Volken, Bil Koonar and Gabrielle Steed from Welcome Home, Jim Stimson from
Little House, Neal Berger and Marshall Smith from Cedars at Cobble Hill and me,
David Berner, from the Drug Prevention network of Canada. The event was packed,
about 100 or so people present.

Harry
Bains welcomed everyone, Sue Hammell gave an excellent overview of the issue
and Harry Ralston MC’d the evening. Two young men from UBC gave a short presentation
about studying harm reduction and methadone for a radio piece they were doing. We
were most pleasantly surprised that, far from following the “official story,”
they found harm reduction initiatives to be completely failing and counter-productive
and they saw methadone for what it is – another market commodity subject to the
same criminal activities as any other powerful drug. They were detailed and
colorful in their presentation.

Another two speakers told us of their recovery home
work.

When
the floor microphone was opened for comment, a line was quickly formed with
contributors speaking passionately and knowledgeably about the need to rid the
community of rogue operations that use and abuse and take advantage of
vulnerable people.

Marshall Smith and I both spoke about finding a practical
solution within the existing and enforceable local Surrey bylaws. We have offered to help write criteria for registration and to help monitor participating agencies.

I
think we all felt that the event was well timed, well run and very positive in
its tone and content. The big issue now is, as always, what real steps

if any
will be taken?

We should add that there were several political personalities in attendance as well, including Jinny Sims, MP, Marvin Hunt, Liberal MLA and Lorne Mayencourt from the Premier's office.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Al Arsenault is a Founding Member of Odd Squad Productions Society which
makes educational videos for youth about drugs and he is a 27-year
veteran with the Vancouver Police Department. He is also a member of the International Task Force on Strategic Drug Policy and a DPNC Board Member.

When
I do anti-drug lectures for Odd Squad, I ask kids if a woman is
pregnant should she smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, do pot or other
drugs, and I get a resounding "No way!" Why not? "Because it will hurt
the fetus." Smart kids!

All
kids in high school acknowledge that they are still physically growing.
Scientific research shows that human brain matures into the early to
mid-20s. So I tell these kids to imagine that the brain is like a baby
growing inside their head - a baby that's in its final trimester. It is
the most important organ of their body, their one and only computer
system, and it has yet to come to full-term. Any questions about
polluting and poisoning the 'baby brain' while it struggles to grow up
healthy?

I
wish that the drug legalizers and health authorities who are pushing
this so-called 'medical marijuana' would acknowledge the simple truth of
this logical line of thinking.

More
more studies are coming about out about the medical effects of
marijuana on the adolescent mind. The earlier you get started on pot
then the more troublesome that drug will be in their lives. This is why I
cannot believe that even responsible adults want to 'vote' marijuana in
as a medicine with it having to go through the strict and rigorous drug
testing protocols like any new safe and legitimate drug has to. They
want to make marijuana an exception to rule of accepting any as a
medicine for public consumption: why bother with medical science when
you have wonderful anecdotes...

Thursday, April 3, 2014

Pete McMartin: A fruitless quest to save the Downtown Eastside

Oversight: PEACH was an ambitious quest to help the Downtown Eastside. Why did it go so wrong?

By Pete McMartin, Vancouver Sun columnistApril 2, 2014

Mary
Morgan, an international consultant in developing countries, was
brought in to head up Partners for Economic and Community Help (PEACH).

Photograph by: Arlen Redekop, Vancouver Sun

VANCOUVER
-- Mary Morgan has seen the worst the world has to offer. Guatemala,
Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Afghanistan, Zambia, Zimbabwe — her
consultancy work in developing nations has given her first-hand
experience with war, poverty and disease. She has worked for CARE, CIDA,
and the International Rescue Committee, among others.

But nothing prepared her for Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

In
2002, she stepped into the job of executive director of Partners for
Economic and Community Help (PEACH). The previous executive director had
left, and Morgan was hired for the job.
PEACH was an initiative
of the Vancouver Agreement, a joint program funded by federal,
provincial and city governments. Its aim was to revitalize the Downtown
Eastside. It has since been shut down, but there would be similar
programs replacing it.

PEACH’s role was — and I quote from the
official bumf — “to give residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside the
tools to improve their situation by furthering community capacity
building, enhancing entrepreneurship and business development, and
creating employment and employment training opportunities.”

Hear
that, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer? The high-minded public relations babble?
The complete absence of measurable goals? If you suspect that perhaps
PEACH was not, in fact, peachy, you would be right. This fruit was
rotten.

Walking into the job, Morgan found an agency without any oversight.

“I
was stunned. ... There were no lending policies, (and this) for an
organization that was solely dedicated to disbursing loans.”

The
PEACH program was divided into two parts. The first was a $1-million
grant fund, all of which had been given away to various DTES “projects”
by the time Morgan had arrived. The second part was a $1-million loan
fund. Morgan found it in disarray.

“Just to give you an idea of
the mess the organization was in, two business loans of $100,000 had
been disbursed with no contracts being signed because there was no
lending procedures or lending policies in place. Without these
procedures in place, the organization essentially handed out free money.
“In
my first three months, I had to write off $350,000 of our $1-million
loan fund that came from Western Diversification (the federal agency
involved in the Vancouver Agreement). Western Diversification told me
that it did not matter if the $1 million was written off. They would
give me another million dollars!”

Among the organization’s board —
which included Mark Townsend, executive director of the Portland
Housing Society — was chair Peter Fairchild, a property manager and
consultant who had worked in the Downtown Eastside (he now lives on
Vancouver Island). He disagreed with Morgan’s view of the control over
loans.

“All of the paperwork,” Fairchild said, “was done with the
best due diligence possible. The money was in the local bank (Four
Corners Community Savings bank) and they wouldn’t have loaned out any
money without the appropriate paperwork being done and everything signed
off.”

(Four Corners was shut down by the provincial government in 2004 after posting annual losses since its inception.)

But
PEACH employee Melanie Buffel, pressed into the position of loans
officer by Morgan, agreed the organization’s oversight procedures were a
mess. “Mary and I ended up working together to close a number of loans
that had really gone nowhere and were never going to be paid off. And
then (we tried) to establish a very rigorous process for giving up new
loans. ... So just the process of making decisions of who was going to
get a loan was very messy and unclear, and so we spent a lot of time
getting a policy and procedure manual in place.”

Said
Morgan of those loans: “They were giving loans up to $100,000 (later
reduced to a maximum of $50,000) without any checks or balances. For
$100,000, you have to get people in there who know how to run a
business. But it was essentially a last-resort lending option, which
means you get the people of highest risk. And so you get people coming
down who wanted free money, and (they) didn’t get penalized.”

Morgan
resigned after 13 months on the job. The last straw came, she said,
when the board of directors killed a pilot project to encourage Downtown
Eastside women to save money. For every dollar they saved, PEACH would
kick in two, with the proviso that the money would go toward helping
them become self-sufficient.

The board, Morgan said, voted it down
because the money could not be considered a loan. “And that’s when I
quit. The loans weren’t working ... and there was no interest whatsoever
in real economic development. When you are working with marginalized
people, there are appropriate business products, and business loans of
$50,000 are not appropriate products for that population.”

The
real issue for Morgan, however, was the lack of oversight by the
government. It was that lack, still continuing today, she said, which
leads to spending scandals like that of the Portland Housing Society.
“The
fact that the government is giving out that kind of money and they
don’t give a damn about what systems are in place, that’s the issue.

“They’re throwing money at (the Downtown Eastside) ... but it hasn’t improved.

“Listen,
I’ve been to some bad places in the world. When I got off the plane in
Liberia, there was no electricity in the whole country. And that place
is moving forward.

“But this is Canada, and (the Downtown
Eastside) is a 10-block area. And why don’t we have better services down
there? And why aren’t we dealing with the real problems?”pmcmartin

Endorsement

"All treatment centres in B.C. should get involved and support the Drug Prevention Network. As one collective voice we need to send the message that treatment works and it saves lives. There are recovery houses, treatment centers, private, government funded, long term, short term, detox, therapeutic communities etc. Let's help support prevention and help educate the public."